1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention described herein pertain to the field of computer systems. More particularly, but not by way of limitation, one or more embodiments of the invention enable methods for utilizing a multi-layered data model to generate audience specific documents.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are many problems associated with generating a document for multiple audiences comprising differing languages in varying media types such as an electronic or print media catalog. Current systems comprise coarse grained internationalization capabilities that do not readily provide these capabilities. For example, a document that is targeted to more than one language may also need to take into account the different regional, regulatory, and cultural requirements of the audience for which the document is published. Furthermore, the generated document must be properly formatted regardless of the media type for which the document is generated. Generating a document for differing media types requires the entry of descriptive layout information that defines the required output for a particular media type. Current systems that attempt to perform this function are generally hardcoded and when a particular piece of data changes, all target media documents must be manually adjusted not only to modify the piece of data, but also the layout of the document. Furthermore, each document output for a given target media type must be laboriously adjusted to meet the needs of the particular media type, generally in different third-party applications.
Current systems for generating internationalized documents fail to take into account the complexities that cause documents to vary on a publication-by-publication basis. For example, the regional, regulatory, and cultural requirements of the audience are generally beyond the scope of current generation internationalization solutions. When publishing documents for a global audience, data that is an appropriate substitute in one instance of the document may not be an adequate substitute in a different instance. French regulations, for instance, prohibit imagery that shows a hypodermic needle whereas in other countries such images are permissible. The same concept is also applicable to language, cultural, and regional requirements associated with a particular document. Current systems provide mechanisms for publishing documents in multiple languages, but require brute force entry of multi-lingual data in a way that tends require large amounts of duplicate operator entries for similar languages, cultural, regional or regulatory specific embodiments of a document. For example, current systems require a complete set of entries for two languages that may only differ in a small way such as United Kingdom and United States English. Current systems do not allow for inheritance of values based on arbitrary divisions in unlimited dimensions and generally only apply to country, language and region for example.
Existing master data management systems require that product families (of which there may be thousands) be manually created. In these existing systems, a product family may be referred to as a presentation, a unit, an ad, or a module. Further, existing systems require that products records be manually added to the families, and also that they be manually moved to a different family if changes in the product record result in its no longer belonging to its original family. In current systems, removal of support for a given audience or media type requires deleting rows or columns in a database as the database is generally structured in current systems. Adding support for a new audience or media type requires copying large amounts of data, either rows or columns using current methods. Regardless of the underlying implementations significant duplicate effort is then required to update documents targeted at each audience and media type.
For at least the limitations described above there is a need for a system that eliminates data entry duplication and allows for the transparent generation of audience specific documents into multiple languages, regions, cultures or regulatory zones or any other user defined division and into a variety of media types.